Amazing. I have a hard time believing that comment isn't sarcastic, its just too perfect. Its hard to tell these days
If its not, it sounds like the output of an LLM if prompted "You are a toddler. Write the most naive and illogical ideological propaganda possible. Offer no rational justification for your thoughts"
This is what happens when one allows oneself to hide in "safe spaces" (like HN) where there's a "no politics" rule enabling people to hide and avoid being confronted with the ramifications of their actions.
The entire world runs on technology now. It's all inherently political.
This exactly hits in on the head. You're trying create a forum absent of politics. In fact, you're just enabling one political view over another. This hides social issues and in the end comes back to undermine your pure "technical view". It's not apolitical, it's disassociation from reality.
Exactly. Declaring that there must be no discussion when confronted with situations in which one party is doing harm to others, is an implicit endorsement of the harms being perpetuated.
Thank you all in this thread! I couldn't have put it better. I cannot stand "no politics rules". Politics divides and it is personal. But it shouldn't be either of those. We should be attacking policy and not people. No politics rules just deny reality because software doesn't exist in a vacuum without policy and money. Heck most people want to use software to get money which is a product of policy.
HN isn't even absent of politics, just the front page is really.
Everything we do is political. When we are making software and publishing it, whether or a company or ourselves, for sale or for free, there are political implications to those actions.
I'm going to defend the HN "no politics" rule here.
The reason "no politics" zones exist is because there are enough people going out of their way to shout at everybody, everywhere, in every corner of the internet and enough people are tired of it that they flock to...no politics zones. In real life, a person like that confronts you...you remove yourself from the situation, because that person who can't stop shouting at everybody comes across as nuts.
Trying to decide how to categorize those giant first page threads from 2022 where Brian Armstrong would complain about activist employees or Google employees would stage walkouts about their employer doing contracts with the Department of Defense, the comments would be chock full of "yeah, actually a company should fire those employees, because business isn't about politics" then a few years later Coinbase drops $150M on the elections and Google is happily working with Palantir to build dragnet surveillance of US citizens.
And besides, what does discussing technology itself have anything to do with it? If you work at big tech you're not allowed to particpate in tech forum as a hobby?
We already discuss politics here as it has to do with tech (privacy is a pretty common topic here for example).
Right, but we should be able to shame, ostracize, and criticize the people that do work at those places because if we don't then it's a tacit approval of what they do.
You know that saying about how if you have three people sharing a bench with a Nazi, you actually have four Nazis? Tech has social and political ramifications, the discussion of which is artificially suppressed on HN.
Most of the time you can't do that here. Try saying something negative about Sam Altman, for example. dang has certain topics he just won't permit and then hides behind the excuse of "if everyone is upset with you, you must be doing something right".
>If you work at big tech you're not allowed to particpate in tech forum as a hobby?
I don't understand what you mean, can you please clarify?
I just disagree. I don't think you're entitled to shame people because you don't agree with the place they work at all. And I don't agree working at Google or whatever means you're not allowed to privately have a forum where you can talk about tech as a hobby.
>And I don't agree working at Google or whatever means you're not allowed to privately have a forum where you can talk about tech as a hobby.
As far as I can tell nobody's advocating this. Anyone is free to spin up a private instance of a hackernews clone (e.g. [0]) or a phpbb instance, or a discord.
But working at DOGE or Palantir or whatever doesn't mean you're entitled to the freedom from consequences of your actions.
I think what op is getting at is that "no politics" rule is what allowed the frog to boil. So banning political discussion is political in and of itself.
I'd agree with your no politics preference if we were in a functioning society that wasn't actively spiralling towards fascism. I recognize that this line is blurry, and that's exactly the reason why no politics zones exist, there is always someone yelling about fascism. He might be a crazy guy on the corner who yells about everything.
I think the difference here is that there is a big critical mass of people who have recognized that the pillars on which our country sit are being actively sabotaged. It's not that everyone wants to be talking about politics all of a sudden, it's that the frog is finally boiling.
> I think what op is getting at is that "no politics" rule is what allowed the frog to boil.
But this simply isn't the case. The fact that "no politics" zones exist is a response to the fact that politics is everywhere else.
People here aren't blissfully unaware, they're just tired of it and many realize that arguing about it on the internet won't accomplish anything other than wasting time. As I sit here writing this, I'm thinking that I'm probably wasting my time.
We all have this idea in our head that if people are confronted with enough evidence, they'll change their minds. But that doesn't happen. People rationalize.
My goodness, people attack RFK Jr non-stop simply because he's part of the Trump administration and all he's done for his entire life is try to help the country be healthier. Every point he's made, every plan he's had and every policy he has advocated for have been totally logically sound. There's been nothing extreme in any of it. Every young parent I know is so relieved with what he's doing and frustrated that it took so long to do what seemed obvious.
But it's not that. It's inflammatory headline after inflammatory headline. It's putting words in his mouth, saying things he didn't say, making statements he didn't make, berating him in front of Congress for click bait video nonsense reading from a script.
It's exhausting. We're all tired of it. If you show me something that you think will convince me of something, I will look at it. And then I will look deeper. I will look to see if any information has been left out. I will look to see if editing has happened.
Because almost every time I invest the time to look into something, I find that it's exaggerated internet nonsense that only plays well in echo chambers. When you do that enough times, your skepticism meter goes to 11.
>people attack RFK Jr non-stop simply because he's part of the Trump administration and all he's done for his entire life is try to help the country be healthier.
My man, the dude is a former heroin addict that has admitted to eating roadkill. He's pushed the vaccines cause Autism narrative.
Trying to make the country healthier while taking huge gifts from lobbyists who work for industrial scale meat producers? Come on.
>We all have this idea in our head that if people are confronted with enough evidence, they'll change their minds. But that doesn't happen. People rationalize.
It's not about changing minds. It's about changing behaviours.
Right now, HN is a place where you can come to talk about the neat technical problems you solved while building software that does the digital equivalent of going to the corner store to buy Hitler a pack of cigarettes, while ignoring the fact that your work is harmful to society.
And nobody is allowed to talk about how maybe we shouldn't do the digital equivalent of going to the corner store and buying Hitler a pack of cigarettes, because it's not cUrIoUs CoNvErSaTiOn.
There's a vast difference between tribal partisan politics and discussing policy as a system of governance (hacking society). I do my best to avoid the former and embrace the latter.
That said, there's a disappointingly significant number of HN members who hew to the latter and embrace the current regime. I consider this to be a forum of intellectual engagement, and that those people walk amongst us is quite distressing.
The “those people” comment is kinda the issue though isn’t it?
I generally try to assume that everyone has good intentions, but we’re all being fed massive amounts of different information. I learned years ago that it wasn’t an issue of people reporting things that were factually inaccurate, it was an issue of people leaving out details to frame the story in the context that supports your readers/viewers belief system.
And then there are the Stanford studies like this:
That's why I prefaced it with "That said" as an acknowledgement of calling out a different tribe.
There's a nuance to this -- the current political environment is not normal and cannot be emphasized enough. The GOP is now a cult of personality and there is no allegiance to country by its members. Its all to one man, who many believe is wholly unqualified for the job.
Its a well-documented phenomenon that millions of people have joined this cult -- many coming from the other side of the aisle. There is no possible reasoning, dialog, or engagement that can make them reconsider.
I would be classified as a "Lefty" if evaluated on my values, but I actually believe in the value of old school conservatism as of "limited government", the value of families, and the ability to have their own personal relationship with God (I am an atheist but I get it).
One of the things that makes America great is the Constitution -- that we are ostensibly a nation governed by law. The current regime does not share those values and is actively hostile to all who do not worship or pay tribute to their leader.
I've been following US politics for half a century and what's happening now would have been unthinkable even 10 years ago.
I live in the southeast so I'm friends with a lot of the people you describe and nothing could be further from the truth of your description.
Most people I know who voted for Trump this time around did it specifically because of what a train wreck the Biden administration was, the terrible candidate that the Democrats tried to put up to replace him and that Trump ran on essentially fixing all of it. Cult of personality and/or hero worship had nothing to do with it.
The man is absolutely abrasive, there's no question about that. But the stock market is at all time highs, the trade deficit is the lowest it's been since 2009, GDP is up 5.5%, inflation has leveled off, gas prices are the lowest I've seen in many years (I just filled up for $2.39 / gallon), the border was closed on day 1 despite years long calls that it couldn't be helped without legislation and today I saw that drug overdose deaths have been cut in half nationally in a single year.
People voted for him to clean up a mess. The cult of personality stuff has been the algorithm at work from everything I've observed to this point.
Yes, HN is my safe space. I have enough politics in my daily life, I don't need it when I'm with phone in my bed trying to wind down.
And which politics? American internal politics are foreign and distant to me. How much do you care about my country internal affairs? Probably not much. And it's OK, you can't fix every country in existence, and if you tried to care you would get insane.
While I completely agree in principle, these threads get very very heated so I can kinda see why HN/dang/our reptilian overlords are trying to keep them from becoming a majority of the site (which they easily could be, absent the flagging of these stories).
Also, I totally understand pruning back discussion that is political, and way off the topic of the actual post/story. People should reasonably be able to read and discuss a non-political story without big political discussion springing up.
Yeah, I don't know where you draw the line. Like, I personally have often gotten a lot of value from HN political threads, but they have been getting worse and worse since about 2016 (I wonder what happened then?) so I can see why other people might just be sick of dealing with the noise.
It's a privilege that many people working in tech have, who then create and populate forums where discussion of that privilege is considered political and therefore forbidden.
Thank you! Everytime you interact with government, it is politics. Filing taxes is politics. TurboTax lobbying against free self filing and government filing is politics and technology. It goes on and on. You cannot avoid politics because politics is about people.
But chatting with absolute strangers about random tech-adjacent topics is an inherently privileged activity. So let's just say the privilege needed to do that is large enough that it also gives you the privilege to not talk about politics.
"My children are starving. Militants have surrounded our village. But let me pop into HN for a bit and drop my hot take on the San Remo Pasta Measurer."
You can see in this threat that confronting people with the ramifications of their actions causes them to double down. They'll just come up with more and more justifications of why the victims deserve it. Same as every mass atrocity.
I don't think you can really blame HN specifically here. It's much wider than that; pretty much the tech industry as a whole actively discourages any kind of philosophical reflection on technology, at least the kind that says you shouldn't build something, even if it's profitable.
> This is what happens when one allows oneself to hide in "safe spaces" (like HN) where there's a "no politics" rule
HN does not have, and never has had (except for a very brief experiment that failed spectacularly and was very quickly aborted) a “no politics” rule, and, in fact, politics is usually all over the site.
There have been some insane politics (especially "culture war" stuff) that got laundered through the HN "reasonable discussion" filter, especially from 2021 through 2024. They still come up all the time. HN loves talking about politics when the commenters can get critical mass to grind the libertarian or "anti-woke" axe.
Not to mention every leader of YCombinator has had some kind of wild politics that come from having money that separates you from any kind of consequence.
Right now, there are people commenting on HN who built software enabling the wholesale violations of the rights of US citizens.
Right now, there are people commenting on HN who built the systems used at Facebook when they experimented with trying to create "symptoms of depression" in their users by manipulating the feed.
And so on and so forth.
But thank goodness we have dang to shield those people from criticism because ItS sO uNoRiGiNaL.
I don't see much moderation of criticism of meta and their employees behavior. Anti authoritarian politics has always been popular on HN. It's only the byzantine team color politics that is moderated.
I maybe get where you’re coming from, but what’s the solution to the issue you’re proposing? Screening everyone’s resume before allowing them to comment? What about people who work at companies that deal with Palantir at completely different departments (Microsoft and Xbox)? It’s obviously untenable
It is true that some users here spew vile ideology while hiding behind HN intellectual rhetoric. Then posts that understandably react strongly to that get flagged, and users get banned. I wish it was different, but I’ve made peace with that being a significant percent of the user base here.
A particular interaction I had comes to mind. A user here boldly and openly proclaimed he discriminated in interviews against people that look different from him, or that are neurodivergent. Actual illegal behaviour that will get you sued in many countries. I reacted strongly and my post got flagged and I received a comment from the moderation team.
I don’t envy the moderation team though, it’s a tough job.
> A particular interaction I had comes to mind. A user here boldly and openly proclaimed he discriminated in interviews against people that look different from him, or that are neurodivergent. Actual illegal behaviour that will get you sued in many countries. I reacted strongly and my post got flagged and I received a comment from the moderation team.
This is the "moderate discourse" problem, where you can express horrendous opinions as long as you are polite, and anyone who reacts emotionally gets criticized instead. You are required to engage these arguments in a detached, logical way as though they have equal intellectual merit, while they advocate for your suffering. This is also why places that enforce moderate discourse tend to become populated with polite fascists.
There's an irony in being protected from having to disclose your data to avoid persecution, while at the same time working on tools that do the exact opposite to everyone else.
> And ppl were worried about China's 1984 style use of Ai, lol.
Came here to say the same...
> In the end it was greedy software developers that enable this.
Nope. First is a failing govt system (not upholding the constitution) that's enabling this.
Second it's not the devs but the business men (that are so much in bed in govt that they have become indistinguishable).
Look, there are software devs (and probably business men) that are equally greedy in, say, Finland/Iceland/etc. But it's not happening there: they simply have a govt that's better for the people at large.
GP didn't say greedy devs caused it, they (we?) are only enabling it.
Obviously there's always the cop out of "someone else would have done it anyway" but it doesn't really change the (un-)ethical side of your choices. I'm not saying it's black and white either - if the other choice is to leave your kids without proper medical care then it's a different thing than just being intentionally blind to ethics.
